Film Screening 26th October, 2018

Upgrade

7:30 PM, 26th October, 2018

Rating MA

Length 100 mins

Year 2018

Grey Trace (Marshall-Green) lives a distinctly analogue life – restoring classic cars for billionaires in a future full of technical advancement. His latest client, Eron Keen (Gilbertson) has developed STEM, a chip designed to connect to anything.

When Grey loses his wife and becomes a paraplegic in a brutal street attack, Keen persuades him to implant STEM into his spine to enable him to walk again. The ultra-intelligent STEM soon proves far more useful, though, in helping Grey find the men who killed his wife, and to exact revenge...

Upgrade combines body horror, cyberpunk futurism and a truly unique action sensibility – Grey’s eventual fight scenes have a great remote-control quality as STEM takes control, where his face just can’t quite believe what his body is getting up to.

Australian Director Whannell has mostly been writing horror for the last decade and a half (the first three Saw movies and the Insidious series) but he proves adept at the film’s action, thriller and comedic elements as well. There’s a fair bit of gore (this is ‘MA’ for a reason) but for anybody looking for a shockingly good action-horror-thriller-comedy, this is for you.

Simon Tolhurst

My Friend Dahmer

9:20 PM, 26th October, 2018

Rating M

Length 103 mins

Year 2017

Published in 2002, the graphic novel “My Friend Dahmer” provided a unique insight into the early life of one of America’s most monstrous serial killers. Author John ‘Derf’ Backderf was a classmate and one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s few high school friends in Ohio in the 1970s. The comic painted a portrait of a troubled, lonely misfit; a class clown struggling with an unstable home life and his own, increasingly disturbing, appetites.

Directed by Marc Meyers, this cinematic adaptation of the graphic novel captures its tone and intent precisely. Ross Lynch’s portrayal of Dahmer is wonderfully subtle, turning a part that could easily have been overblown and hammy into a performance that engenders sympathy in a troubled young man, even as he exudes a menace that hints at the monster young Jeffrey is to become.

This film, as with the story it is based off, never strays into the realm of the slasher flick, and is rather better described as a coming-of-age film. Suspenseful, eerie and at times charming, My Friend Dahmer is a one-of-a-kind biopic – equal parts Stand By Me and American Psycho – and well worth your time.